Chrystal Hurst explains how women's nurturing nature can mask burnout, using a fish-out-of-water metaphor. She identifies signs you're no longer thriving: constant fatigue, lost connection, gasping for air. The fix is choosing environments that let you breathe and realigning with your true design.
How to recognize that you're not thriving. How do you recognize that you're gasping for air? If you're like me, you do what you do because it's time to do it, right? You do what you do because it's time to do it. We girls are really good at getting things done. We are helpers by nature, many of us, most of us. It's a part of the woman's design. We have a higher level of intuition, which means that we often can palpate a room. We know what's happening. We know what's not happening that should be. We often want to fix. We want to save, we want to help. Um, it's a part of the DNA. Even if we do that to varying degrees, I realize that some of us are by nature ridiculous nurturers and everybody, we have to solve everybody's problems. But there are those of us who don't have to solve everybody's problem, but we do want to make things better than they were before we arrived. And so it takes a minute often for us to even recognize that we're a fish out of water, not exactly breathing the air. The air we were designed to breathe or breathing the way we were designed to breathe. And so what we need, often we don't give ourselves because we are doing the next thing. And you don't even pause to think, you know, is this the thing I'm supposed to be doing? Is this the air I actually want to breathe? I thought I could breathe, and I may have been functioning but I'm actually not fully able to do the thing the way I thought I wanted to do it. Right back there, there's a large pond. It's not a lake, it's not a creek, it's just a very, very large body of water. And so, uh, Priscilla loves to fish. Like, she 100%— my sister Priscilla loves to fish. And so she has instilled a love of fishing in many of her nieces and nephews. So it's a whole thing. And we don't even like to touch the fish. We're not real fishermen. We have to get the gloves in order to— 'cause we catch 'em and throw 'em back. It's a bunch of little perches out here. Perch, plural, fish. And we catch 'em and throw 'em back. And every now and again, every now and again, you catch something that's worth keeping. We look at it. And kind of stand there and you go, are we going to keep that? Is it big enough? How much do you think it weighs? And that poor fish, while we're sitting there deciding its fate, just deciding its fate, it's just flopping around. But while the fish— while we're deciding the fish's fate and deciding what do we want to do in this season with you, the fish is just trying to stay alive. He was trying to stay alive when he got hooked on the bait. He was trying to stay alive. While we're sitting there deciding his fate. Oh, I rhymed! It's awesome. He was doing what we would expect him to do, and that is— or her— to stay alive. And then he or she got hooked. They got hooked and then were in a holding pattern until we actually decided what we wanted to do. And it's just sitting there looking so sad, like You know, literally just looking sad, looking like, "I just want to get back in the water." It ends up in a situation it never intended to be in simply because it was trying to stay alive. And that's what has happened to many of us. We've ended up in a situation we never intended to be in just because we We were trying to stay alive. So there's Priscilla, happily excited to be looking for her fish. You see how ecstatic she is? I mean, it's just amazing how excited she gets about fishing. And she doesn't need to do it with her kids. She's just like, "All right, I'm gonna go fishing before we pick up the kids from their day camp." Wanna hear it? Hear it go. We catch and we release. Because most of the time, most of the time, we don't intend to keep the fish. And most of the time, the hills and valleys that you ride on in your life, the problems, the seasons, they're catch and release. They're not designed to last. What you did last year to survive was a season. That was not designed to last. But during that season, and even in this season, you may be thinking, I cannot breathe. And you get to decide what kind of environment you want to live in. We will be gasping for air in our lives. You know, have you ever seen a fish flop on a deck? They're trying to find their— they're trying to figure out how to get themselves out of the situation. That they're in. That it doesn't look pretty, it doesn't look coordinated, it doesn't look seamless and effortless. They are putting all of their energy into finding their way back to a place of health, a place of wellness, a place where they can breathe. And many of us, how we find our way back or attempt to find our way back to that place of equilibrium, it looks like a lot of floppin'. And it doesn't have to. Can I just tell you that what you did last year is probably not sustainable, even if you throttled all the way down, because even being alone is not sustainable. We were designed for connection. What did you change about your life last year that's not sustainable? That's not the way you're supposed to live. It taught you something. It, it showed you another part of your world, but it's not where you're supposed to live. You're not supposed to constantly be trying to play catch-up personally or professionally. You're not supposed to have less face time with family and friends. You're not supposed to be burning the candle at both ends, trying to do schoolwork with your kids and working at home and negotiating with your spouse. You're not supposed to feel out of alignment in the long term. Now. These are signs. When you realize, I can't breathe, things are out of alignment, I'm missing contact with people, I'm depressed and I don't know why, I feel down and I can't pinpoint the reason— these are your brain and your body and the build of your soul telling you you're a fish out of water. You were not designed for this. And as the world opens up, you get to decide where you can breathe. This year you get to choose how you reset. Just because you did it the way you did it doesn't mean that's the way you have to continue to do the thing. Hi! Hey everybody, what's going on? Hope y'all are doing well. Mm-hmm.
